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Childhood Poverty Is Societyâ€™s Fault? Really?

Nine years later, the nation no longer clings quite so
tightly to the ideal of the 1950s family, but policies and practices lag
behind. â€¦ Our lack of quality childcare and after-school programs puts
these kids at risk and endangers the nationâ€™s future in a knowledge
economy. Our lack of support for flexible work arrangements and Social
Security credits for caregivers puts these parents at risk. However,
there is good news: health care reform will be an enormous help to these
families. They are raising our future citizens and building our
productive assets at great cost to themselves and with little help from
the rest of us.

Look, I agree that we ought to have more flexibility in our labor
laws to make it easier for things like parents taking sick leave to care
for their kids. That the government is responsible for â€śquality child
care and afterschool programsâ€ť? Well, call me skeptical.

Whatâ€™s so interesting, and frustrating, about this piece is that it
doesnâ€™t seem to have occurred to this writer that single parenthood is
something to be avoided. Itâ€™s just one of those choices that people
make, and public policy should accommodate it. The rhetoric about
â€śraising our future citizens and building our productive assetsâ€ť is
airy-fairy and moralistic, and conceals the true nature of the crisis.
The idea seems to be that if we shifted public policy a bit, we would
solve, or go a long way toward solving, the problem of single parenthood
and childhood poverty. To a certain kind of liberal, thereâ€™s no problem
that a new government program canâ€™t solve.

Yes, 33 percent of children are born to single mothers;
in 2004, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, that
amounted to 1.5 million children, the highest number ever. But the vast
majority of those children are going home from the maternity wards to
low-rent apartments. Yes, experts predict that about 40 to 50 percent of
marriages will break up. But most of those divorces will involve women
who have always shopped at Wal-Mart. â€ś[T]he rise in single-parent
families is concentrated among blacks and among the less educated,â€ť
summarize Ellwood and Jencks. â€śIt hardly occurred at all among women
with a college degree.â€ť

When Americans began their family revolution four decades ago, they
didnâ€™t tend to talk very much about its effect on children. That
oversight now haunts the country, as it becomes increasingly clear that
the Marriage Gap results in a yawning social divide. If you want to
discuss why childhood poverty numbers have remained stubbornly high
through the years that the nation was aggressively trying to lower them,
begin with the Marriage Gap. Thirty-six percent of female-headed
families are below the poverty line.

The new states Kornbluh reports indicate that that number is now almost 50 percent. More Hymowitz:

For children born at the bottom of the income scale, the situation is the reverse. They face a decrease in
what McLanahan terms â€śresourcesâ€ť: their mothers are younger, less
stable, less educated, and, of course, have less money. Adding to their
woes, those children arenâ€™t getting much (or any) financial support and
time from their fathers. Surprisingly, McLanahan finds that in
Europe, tooâ€”where welfare supports for â€ślone parents,â€ť as they are known
in Britain, are much higher than in the United Statesâ€”single mothers
are still more likely to be poor and less educated. [Emphasis
mine -- RD] As in the United States, so in Europe and, no doubt, the
rest of the world: children in single-parent families are getting less
of just about everything that we know helps to lead to successful
adulthood.

These single moms are by and large not raising â€śour productive
assets.â€ť There are obviously exceptions â€” we all know them â€” but
statistics indicate that these women are raising kids who will be just
like them, or, if they are males, like the fathers who abandoned their
children. Here, from Hymowitz, is the important point:

There is something fundamentally different about
low-income single mothers and their educated married sisters. But a key
part of that difference is that educated women still believe in marriage as an institution for raising children.
What is missing in all the ocean of research related to the Marriage
Gap is any recognition that this assumption is itself an invaluable
piece of cultural and psychological capitalâ€”and not just because it
makes it more likely that children will grow up with a dad in the house.
As societyâ€™s bulwark social institution, traditional marriageâ€”that is,
childbearing within marriageâ€”orders social life in ways that we only
dimly understand.

For one thing, women who grow up in a marriage-before-children
culture organize their lives around a meaningful and beneficial life
script. Traditional marriage gives young people a map of life that takes
them step by step from childhood to adolescence to college or other
work trainingâ€”which might well include postgraduate educationâ€”to the
workplace, to marriage, and only then to childbearing. A marriage
orientation also requires a young woman to consider the question of what
man will become her husband and the father of her children as a major,
if not the major, decision of her life. In other words, a
marriage orientation demands that a woman keep her eye on the future,
that she go through life with deliberation, and that she use
self-disciplineâ€”especially when it comes to sex: bourgeois women still
consider premature pregnancy a disaster. In short, a marriage
orientationâ€”not just marriage itselfâ€”is part and parcel of her bourgeois
ambition.

When Americans announced that marriage before childbearing was
optional, low-income women didnâ€™t merely lose a steadfast partner, a
second income, or a trusted babysitter, as the strength-in-numbers
theory would have it. They lost a traditional arrangement that
reinforced precisely the qualities that they-and their men; letâ€™s not
forget the men!â€”needed for upward mobility, qualities all the more
important in a tough new knowledge economy.

Want to tweak public policy to give single parents a break? Fine. But
donâ€™t tell yourselves that this is going to make a significant
difference in the future of kids born into these circumstances, or left
there because of divorce. There really are deleterious consequences to
the welfare of children â€” including the adults these kids will grow up
to be â€” from our sexually permissive culture. The cost of out-of-wedlock
childbearing cannot be significantly ameliorated with public policy
adjustments. Should it be?

There was just some study that came out that showed that children that go to daycares in America are more likely to be aggressive then children that stay at home, mostly because how crappy the childcare is here! We need to realize that people have to work, and make sure that all children are being cared for properly at daycares!
The same kind of study was done in Norway and there was no difference!
We have to let mothers or primary caregivers stay home with their infants so they can bond properly!
Many patents will be shitty no matter what so it is our job as a society to make sure these children are cared for with love and respect outside the home! Give every child a equal opportunity to become the best they can, and we will see happier more productive citizens in the future!

It's a struggle to even remain civil to people a lot of the time in there lol. You and I and maybe 3 or 4 others are sane and have self worth.

That group makes me feel so old sometimes.

Quoting furbabymum:

I'm always glad when I see you in a post. It means I'm not the only one there thinking WTF.

Quoting ReadWriteLuv:

Standards and basic self respect are woefully lacking in the average Poster in L&M lol.

Quoting furbabymum:

I blame entitlement. I'm in the love and marriage group. You've no idea how few people are actually willing to put effort into their relationships. There is this idea that it should be and will always be magical and if it's not then obviously you should split up. Also, standards are awfully low. Why it is optional for a guy to take on child rearing tasks is beyond me. I'd never have kids with a guy who thought that was ok. That's the thing though, I've got standards. I have self worth. A lot of women don't and part of that is society.

I completely agree. I WAS one of those I had horrible standards of who I had my DS with. Instead of continuing the cycle and expecting a hand out I corrected the situation. I took control of my life and made my life along with my sons better and made sure it didn't happen again instead of complaining about what others should do for me.

Quoting ElitestJen:

Childhood poverty is the fault of the parents. Period.

Women have increasingly low standards for the men they lay with. Men have low standards for the women they impregnate. Society has low standards in general. After all, we have to be "tolerant."

Women have increasingly low standards for the men they lay with.Â Men have low standards for the women they impregnate.Â Society has low standards in general.Â After all, we have to be "tolerant."

there are children in America that do NOT get the same opportunities as other children! These children then grow up uneducated with many problems and keep repeating the cycle! Society is partially to blame for all these children living in poverty!

It's a struggle to even remain civil to people a lot of the time in there lol. You and I and maybe 3 or 4 others are sane and have self worth.

That group makes me feel so old sometimes.

Quoting furbabymum:

I'm always glad when I see you in a post. It means I'm not the only one there thinking WTF.

Quoting ReadWriteLuv:

Standards and basic self respect are woefully lacking in the average Poster in L&M lol.

Quoting furbabymum:

I blame entitlement. I'm in the love and marriage group. You've no idea how few people are actually willing to put effort into their relationships. There is this idea that it should be and will always be magical and if it's not then obviously you should split up. Also, standards are awfully low. Why it is optional for a guy to take on child rearing tasks is beyond me. I'd never have kids with a guy who thought that was ok. That's the thing though, I've got standards. I have self worth. A lot of women don't and part of that is society.

Women have increasingly low standards for the men they lay with. Men have low standards for the women they impregnate. Society has low standards in general. After all, we have to be "tolerant."

there are children in America that do NOT get the same opportunities as other children! These children then grow up uneducated with many problems and keep repeating the cycle! Society is partially to blame for all these children living in poverty!

That's horseshit. There's plenty of opportunities for these kids. If they're not afforded them, then that lies on their slacker parents who refuse to seek out those resources. How many stories do you hear of first generation immigrants finding and making opportunities for their kids? I hear them often. People with NOTHING manage to raise productive members of society, yet "poor people" can't? What a farse.

It's a struggle to even remain civil to people a lot of the time in there lol. You and I and maybe 3 or 4 others are sane and have self worth.

That group makes me feel so old sometimes.

Quoting furbabymum:

I'm always glad when I see you in a post. It means I'm not the only one there thinking WTF.

Quoting ReadWriteLuv:

Standards and basic self respect are woefully lacking in the average Poster in L&M lol.

Quoting furbabymum:

I blame entitlement. I'm in the love and marriage group. You've no idea how few people are actually willing to put effort into their relationships. There is this idea that it should be and will always be magical and if it's not then obviously you should split up. Also, standards are awfully low. Why it is optional for a guy to take on child rearing tasks is beyond me. I'd never have kids with a guy who thought that was ok. That's the thing though, I've got standards. I have self worth. A lot of women don't and part of that is society.

Women have increasingly low standards for the men they lay with. Men have low standards for the women they impregnate. Society has low standards in general. After all, we have to be "tolerant."

there are children in America that do NOT get the same opportunities as other children! These children then grow up uneducated with many problems and keep repeating the cycle! Society is partially to blame for all these children living in poverty!

It is not societies fault that they choose to make their parents mistakes.

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